Colby Quarterly
Volume 17
Issue 4 December
December 1981
The Role of Celia Thaxter in American Literary
History: An Overview
Jane Vallier
Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq
Recommended Citation
Colby Library Quarterly, Volume 17, no.4, December 1981, p.238-255
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Quarterly by an
authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Colby. For more information, please contact [email protected].
Article 6
Vallier: The Role of Celia Thaxter in American Literary History: An Overvi
The Role of Celia Thaxter
in American Literary History:
An Overview
by JANE VALLIER
are two stories to tell about the lives of many women writers
in nineteenth-century America. The first story, whether it be told
T
about Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson or Celia Thaxter, is a rather
HERE
conventional melodrama about a talented woman who stole time from
her domestic duties to write an amazing quantity of literature, some of it
a recognizable variation on the "standard" literature written by Emerson, Longfellow and Whittier. The superficial "first story" has been
chronicled in American literary history by generations of critics and historians who concluded that women in nineteenth-century Americawith the exception of Emily Dickinson, perhaps-wrote an enormous
pile of second-rate literature, the imputed inferiority of which was based
in the erroneous but widespread belief that female experience was in
itself an inferior fornl of human experience.
Typical of the muddled judgment women's writing has received is this
statement made by Robert Spiller in The Cycle of American Literature,
1955: "There is something about the way women lived in the nineteenth
century that encouraged repression."· Spiller, like most of the literary
historians of his and earlier generations, was content to leave that
"something" a vague and unsolvable mystery; "something" was not
worth investigating. There was, he assumed, neither rhyme nor reason
to women's literary expression. The question of what was repressed or
why anything was repressed did not seem worth pursuing; rather, the
critic-historian threw up his hands in despair and sighed, "Women!
We'll never understand them!"
The repression of which Spiller speaks has become one source of entry
into the "second story"-the real story-of the lives of female writers in
America. Today, when the literary profession appears to be flooded
with information-all that eager graduate students and tireless computers can compile-we still know precious little about the lives and works
of women writing in nineteenth-century America. Thanks to the language of modern psychology and to the social revolution which calls for
a total re-evaluation of female experience, one dimension of which is lit1. Robert E. Spiller, The Cycle of American Literature: An Essay in Historical Criticism (New York:
The Free Press, 1955), p. 124.
238
Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1981
1
Colby Quarterly, Vol. 17, Iss. 4 [1981], Art. 6
JANE VALLIER
239
erary expression, the labor and the pleasure of telling these "second"
stories is now before us.
No study of female literary experience in the nineteenth century
would be complete without reference to Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination,2 a comprehensive study which
covers not only the popular canon of such writers as Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and
Emily Dickinson, but takes the reader into the lesser known texts of
these famous authors wherein can be found unmistakably the "second
story." Gilbert and Gubar devise a revolutionary method which affords
entry into the turbulent and enlightening "second stories," filled as they
are with the images of entrapment, metaphors of physical and mental
illness, and the reality of madness. That is what Spiller's mysterious
"repression" is all about.
Much of that which nineteenth-century female writers repressed
comes to life in the letters, the diaries, the unpublished fragments of
poems and the autobiographies that these women wrote. Thus it becomes imperative that the full canon of each writer be available before
literary and historical judgments be made on their work. The "second
story" cannot be told until the texts upon which the "first story" is
based are clearly and accurately established. As Thomas Johnson provided this scholarly material in establishing the case for Emily Dickinson, and as Paula Blanchard has done in assembling the facts of the case
for Margaret Fuller, so this study will begin to compile the facts of the
case for Celia Thaxter, a poet whose work represents the popular taste
of her day, and even more importantly, whose literary life stands as sign
and syn1bol for all that women in the nineteenth century could-and
could not-accomplish.
A rewriting of the female literary history is perhaps the major academic and aesthetic responsibility of our generation of literary scholarship. The study of Celia Thaxter is part of the vast amount of work to
be done, work that includes the establishment of accurate texts, the recasting of biographies, and the re-evaluation of literary traditions. In
the case of Celia Thaxter, perhaps the most widely published woman
writing poetry in America during the last half of the nineteenth century, 3
the establishment of an accurate text is not a problem, although the assembling of the canon into a complete and usable volume remains to be
done.
The challenge for today's student of Celia Thaxter's poetry lies in
transcending the conventional reading of the poems, a reading which
2. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979).
3. Anna Mary Wells, Dear Preceptor: The Life and Times of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), p. 116.
http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol17/iss4/6
2
Vallier: The Role of Celia Thaxter in American Literary History: An Overvi
240
COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERLY
too often ends in dismissal of Thaxter as a serious poet. A serious and
self-conscious artist she was, and so the "first story" of her life and art
must be written accurately so the that the "second story" can be read. It
will be found that many of the difficulties other female writers such as
Dickinson and Fuller met will also be found in Celia Thaxter's literary
life. The themes and patterns that Gilbert and Gubar find hidden in
works of Austen, the Brontes, Eliot, Barrett Browning and Dickinson
will be found in works of Thaxter, acutely aware as she was of literary
traditions and conventions of her time.
The external events of Celia Thaxter's life are in themselves so dramatic that readers might be content with just the recounting of the "first
story": Her childhood at the White Island Lighthouse, her arranged
marriage to Levi Thaxter, her experiences as wife and mother, her widespread popularity as a poet, her friendships with Whittier and Annie
Fields, her later years which alternated from the depths of illness and
poverty to the heights of public adoration as a Cult of the Beautiful centered around her poetry, her garden, and her life.
Telling the "second story" of Thaxter's life requires not only the
conlplete re-reading of her prose and poetry, but also the assembling of
all extant correspondence, and an investigation into the domestic realities of her everyday life. For example, one of the central facts which
emerges in Thaxter's letters is the exhaustion caused by the daily domestic labor. Illness seemed to be the normal state of affairs in the Thaxter
family life, leaving Celia the only vigorous and healthy one. The burden
of caring for her brain-damaged child, Karl, and an invalid husband,
Levi, must have weighed heavily, given the fact that there was no medical treatment from which either the child or the husband could benefit.
Just this one example of the difficulties with which she struggled on a
daily basis would be enough to discourage any writer. The recounting of
some of these burdens, then, becomes a method of measuring how fully
committed Thaxter was to her role as a poet. Finally, her story illustrates how strong, how invincible was the tradition of the female literary
imagination in nineteenth-century America.
Part II: The Island Miranda
THE CROSS-CURRENTS of the mid-nineteenth-century American culture flowed through the life of Celia Thaxter. A third generation Transcendentalist, Celia began her public career as a lyric poet, and then progressed through successive stages of development as a folklorist, a juvenile author, a free-lance journalist, a dramatic actress who wrote her
own material, and finally a highly respected naturalist who won the admiration of John Burroughs. The variety of Thaxter's talents, abilities
and interests can be accounted for only in terms of genius.
In 1851 Nathaniel Hawthorne spoke for literary New England when
Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1981
3
Colby Quarterly, Vol. 17, Iss. 4 [1981], Art. 6
JANE VALLIER
241
he referred to sixteen-year-old Celia Thaxter as the "Island Miranda,"
thus identifying Celia with two important literary sources: First, the
obedient daughter of King Prospero in The Tempest, and second, the
learned dau'ghter of a wise father who saw the necessity of his daughter's education. 4 The second "Miranda," who serves as an ideal example in Fuller's Women in the Nineteenth Century, was raised somewhat
as Celia was, outside of the constraints of a traditional female education. 5 Uncomfortable as Hawthorne was with Margaret Fuller herself,
he recognized in young Celia many qualities Fuller had hoped women
might cultivate in the nineteenth century. The unusual combination of
intelligence, common sense and natural beauty that Hawthorne saw in
Levi Thaxter's young bride was recorded in his American Notebooks;
furthermore, he commented that she was unspoiled and unaffected by
the models of femininity that Boston had to offer. 6
Ten years before Hawthorne's visit to the Isles of Shoals, he and Levi
Thaxter had joined James Russell Lowell, Maria White, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and other young Boston intellectuals in Elizabeth Peabody's bookstore perhaps to hear Margaret Fuller's brilliant conversations, not the least of which were about the role of women in American
life. 7 Margaret Fuller's discussions on education for American women
must have fallen on receptive ears, for from this group called "the
Brothers and Sisters" were to come several men whose social and intellectual relationships with women were to break away from traditional
norms. It is probable that Levi Thaxter heard Fuller elaborate on the
importance of education for women: "The position I early was enabled
to take was one of self-reliance. And were all women as sure of their
wants as I was, the results would be the same. . . . The difficulty is
to get them to the point from which they shall naturally develop selfrespect and learn self-help."8 That education was the road to self-reliance and self-respect for women Levi knew in his heart, but time would
reveal that he was a man who could seldom match ideals with actions.
He did, however, place Celia in a social position where her talents would
be appreciated-notwithstanding the fact that she was a woman. First as
Celia's tutor, and later as her husband, Levi Thaxter was to introduce
the "Island Miranda" to Boston Brahmin society where she would win
the affection and the interest of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Howells,
Dickens and Browning.
Quite by accident, young Celia Laighton had received somewhat the
same education that Bronson Alcott was trying to achieve in his experi4. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974), VIII,
537.
5. Margaret Fuller, Women in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1968), p. 38.
6. Hawthorne, p. 516.
7. See letter from Levi Lincoln Thaxter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, April 20, 1842, Houghton
Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
8. Fuller, p. 40.
http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol17/iss4/6
4
Vallier: The Role of Celia Thaxter in American Literary History: An Overvi
242
COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERLY
mental school and that Margaret Fuller was trying to prescribe in
Women in the Nineteenth Century. Celia was educated by her father at
the White Island Lighthouse during the long winters of her early childhood. Thomas Laighton taught Celia not only her reading and arithmetic, but he taught her at a very young age to think for herself-just as
Margaret Fuller hoped that all women would someday be able to do.
Margaret Fuller's description of Miranda's education serves as a
prophecy for Celia:
Her father was a man who cherished no sentimental reverence for Woman, but a firm
belief in the equality of the sexes. She was his eldest child, and came to him at an age
when he needed a companion. From the time she could speak and go alone, he addressed
her not as a plaything, but as a living mind. Among the few verses he ever wrote was a
copy addressed to this child, when the first locks were cut from her head; and the reverence expressed on this occasion for that cherished head, he never belied. It was to him the
temple of immortal intellect. He respected his child, however, too much to be an indulgent
parent. He called on her for clear judgment, for courage, for honor and fidelity; for such
virtue as he knew. In so far as he possessed the keys to the wonders of this universe, he
allowed free use of them to her, and by the incentive of a high expectation, he forbade, so
far as possible, that she should let the privilege lie. 9
Whether or not her head was a "temple of immortal intellect," Celia
was recognized by her father as having an uncommon mind. Celia's
childhood play was spent in imitation of her father's activities; that is,
she launched little purple boats of mussel shells and orated to the gulls,
the rocks, and the waves. What a thrill of power the child must have felt
as she climbed the lighthouse stairs to light the mirrored lamps which
then shone for miles into the darkness. As she surveyed the rolling sea,
little Celia must have felt like a princess in a tower. What a sense of
drama nlust have seized her imagination-indeed the island was her
stage in the vast ocean!
But all of her childhood moments were not so carefree, and she recalls
that during a storm in 1839, while she and her family were living at the
lighthouse: "We were startled by the heavy booming of guns through
the roar of the tempest-a sound that drew nearer and nearer, till at
last, through a sudden break in the mist and spray we saw the heavily
rolling hull of a large vessel driving by, to her sure destruction, toward
the coast . . . and well I remember that hand on my shoulder which
held me firmly, shuddering child that I was, and forced me to look in
spite of myself." 10 Celia learned later that day that it was the brig Pocahontas, homeward bound from Spain, and that the vessel and all her
crew were lost. The "firm hand" that Celia recalled was that of her
father, introducing her to the world outside the domestic sphere-a new
world which Margaret Fuller herself saw as the domain of women in the
nineteenth century.
Little Celia Laighton was not a pampered child hidden away from the
9. Fuller, p. 38.
10. Celia Thaxter, Among the Isles of Shoals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1873), p. 143.
Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1981
5
Colby Quarterly, Vol. 17, Iss. 4 [1981], Art. 6
JANE VALLIER
243
harsh world by her father, nor did any stale classroom confine her.
Fuller's description of Miranda's education again applies equally to the
White Island child:
This child was early led to feel herself a child of the spirit. She took her place easily, not
only in the world of organized being, but in the world of mind. A dignified sense of selfdependence was given as all her portion, and she found it a sure anchor. Herself securely
anchored, her relations with others were established with equal security. She was fortunate
in a total absence of those charms which might have drawn her bewildering flatteries, and
in a strong electric nature, which repelled those who did not belong to her and attracted
those who did. I 1
Hawthorne had observed that Celia was easy-mannered and unaffected,
but his opinion was contradicted by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the
only intimate who ever wrote an unflattering remark about young Celia.
Higginson had been Levi Thaxter's college roommate and intimate
friend; furthermore, he might have felt a bit rejected when Levi turned
his attention and affection toward Celia. Higginson wrote that she was
silly and prone to exaggeration; 12 nonetheless, Higginson was willing to
defer judgment until Celia was older-she was only fifteen at the time,
and perhaps too high spirited for his taste.
Margaret Fuller's Miranda, however, was completely winsome. Stressing the importance of friendship, Fuller wrote of Miranda words that
were often used to describe Celia: "With men and women her relations
were noble,-affectionate, without passion, intellectual without coldness. The world was free to her, and she lived freely in it. Outward adversity came, and inward conflict; but that faith and self-respect had
early been awakened which must always lead, at last, to an outward
serenity and an inward peace." 13 The ideal that Fuller held for her Miranda was to be echoed in the words of Celia Thaxter's friends throughout her life.
When in 1846 Levi Thaxter took over the tutorial duties of Thomas
Laighton, he was still in regular contact with the young Transcendentalists who had grouped a few years earlier around Margaret Fuller. Levi
Thaxter was just the man to experiment with Fuller's ideals, for he was
a model of the Transcendental spirit, sustained, as so many of the serious Transcendentalists were, by private income. Thus Levi Thaxter,
trained professionally as both lawyer and actor, could proceed to
complete the education of Celia Laighton with leisurely strolls along the
beach, dramatic story-telling around the family hearth, and occasional
investigations into the scientific lore of seaweeds and mosses.
Like the formal education of most women in her day-including Margaret Fuller's a generation earlier-Celia Thaxter's education was un11.
12.
(New
13.
Fuller, p. 39.
Mary Thacher Higginson, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906
York: Da Capo, 1969), p. 25.
Fuller, p. 39.
http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol17/iss4/6
6
Vallier: The Role of Celia Thaxter in American Literary History: An Overvi
244
COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERLY
even and unsystematic. Fuller had written that if a woman knows too
much, "she will never find a husband; a superior woman hardly ever
can." 14 Levi Thaxter recognized early that his young pupil was a genius
and that she would probably out-distance him, but that realization did
not cause him to direct her education in any manner except by haphazard conversations about whatever was on his mind-or whatever was
blowing in the wind.
Although both Mr. Laighton and Mr. Thaxter had begun their pedagogical tasks with enthusiasm and idealism, neither man was capable of
carrying on Celia's education with systematic rigor. The press of business in Mr. Laighton's life and the absence of structure in Mr. Thaxter's
life pulled the two men in opposite directions. After about the age of
ten, Celia was left to educate herself.
The neglect of Celia Thaxter's formal education, seen in retrospect,
was a sin of omission on the part of both her father and her husband.
Lacking a traditional, Latinate education, Celia was reluctant to
acknowledge her own talent and her own genius. In one of her letters
she asks her editor, James T. Fields, "Don't you know I never went to
school? I can fancy you smiling and saying to yourself that there is little
need of telling you that." 15 Thaxter's letters abound with such selfdeprecating comments and apologies. The lack of a formal education so
undermined her self-confidence that she could seldom free herself from
an editor long enough to experiment and grow artistically. Thus little
development is found in either her prose or her poetry. Rather, Thaxter
skipped from one genre to another-from lyric to ballad to mystery tale,
from local history to juvenile fiction to hymns and greeting card verse.
Where could a talented woman turn for support? Speaking of the
mythical "Judith Shakespeare" whose story she so convincingly wrote,
Virginia Woolf posed the classic problem of the female poet: "It seemed
to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare's sister as I had made it . . .
that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would
probably have gone crazed. . . . For it needs little skill in psychology to
be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry
would have been so thwarted and hindered . . . that she must have lost
her health and sanity to a certainty." 16 Both Fuller and Thaxter would
have undoubtedly testified that a woman in the nineteenth century
might also go crazed, limited as she was not only in expression but also
education.
The lack of systematic formal education might also have been a factor
in Celia Thaxter's preference for oral rather than written literature. It
could be said that Thaxter wrote poetry "by ear" much in the same way
14. Fuller, p. 120.
15. Rosamond Thaxter, Sandpiper: The Life and Letters of Celia Thaxter (Francetown, N.H.: Golden Quill, 1963), p. 131.
16. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929), p. 51.
Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1981
7
Colby Quarterly, Vol. 17, Iss. 4 [1981], Art. 6
J ANE VALLIER
245
an untrained person with some musical talent might play the piano "by
ear." A generation earlier Margaret Fuller had seen that most American
women were in fact educated "by ear," and she set about in her conversations to induce active thinking rather than passive listening in the
minds of the Boston women whom she hoped to liberate from male intellectual domination. But Thaxter, like Margaret Fuller herself, continued to seek advice and inspiration from the public lectures and private
conversations of such men as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore
Parker. The pulpit and the lecture hall demanded the masculine voice,
and there was little that the idealism of Fuller or the wide-ranging intellectual curiosity of Celia Thaxter could do to change that fact.
The Transcendental ideals of education were, unfortunately, not to
serve Celia Thaxter very well. Although self-reliant, individualistic, sensitive to the intimations of nature around her, Celia was not possessed
of the additional resources that it would take for a woman in the late
nineteenth century to succeed at a serious literary career. From today's
perspective it can be seen that there were some stringent requirements
for a woman's becoming a writer whose reputation was more than
ephemeral. Seen in retrospect, economic issues lay at the root of these
requirements:
1. A formal Latinate education, either public or private. Only the
wealthy could afford to educate their daughters. It was difficult to
compete with the popular poets of the day-Longfellow, Lowell,
Holmes-without some classical studies.
2. Freedom from the daily press of domestic chores. Cooking, cleaning, child-care, and invalid nursing were the economic as well as
the moral responsibilities of women. (Neither Thaxter nor Fuller
had a "Lavinia" to care for her as Emily Dickinson did.)
The economic straits of most nineteenth-century American women were
all but inescapable, and Celia won a degree of financial independence
too late to do her career any good. Levi's high-minded Transcendentalism didn't include such mundane considerations as allowing his wife
household help, and thus Celia was forced to write most of her poetry in
a state of mental, physical and emotional exhaustion.
In the earlier days at the lighthouse Celia's mind had been allowed to
range freely, but at the Thaxter household in Newtonville she was a prisoner, a slave to Levi's wishes. Margaret Fuller predicted a generation
earlier what would happen in this type of marriage:
For the weak and immature man will often admire a superior woman, but he will not be
able to abide by a feeling which is too severe a tax on his habitual existence . . . he loves,
but cannot follow her; yet is the association not without an enduring influence. Poetry has
been domesticated in his life; and though he strives to bind down her heavenward impulses, as art of apothegm, these are only the tents beneath which he may sojourn for a
while, but which may be easily struck, and carried on limitless wanderings. 17
17. Fuller, p. 127.
http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol17/iss4/6
8
Vallier: The Role of Celia Thaxter in American Literary History: An Overvi
246
COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERLY
Levi's own failures as a man and as an artist eventually made it impossible for him to live with his wife's success. Celia's letters of the 1870's
period sound much the same note as those written by Margaret Fuller a
generation earlier when Margaret was forced by necessity to assume the
financial burden of her family, educate her younger brothers and sisters,
and still manage to steal time for her own writing.
In theory, the Transcendentalists should have been leading the way
for women's education and women's rights. In practice, it was quite the
opposite. Emerson gave lip-service to the idea of a woman's developing
her individual talents, but he was uncomfortable around women, such
as Fuller, who did. The most positive contribution to women's rights
was made by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who supported not only
women's political rights, but also their artistic rights. His willingness to
encourage the poetic genius of Emily Dickinson along with that of
several other writers such as Helen Hunt Jackson and Harriet Spofford
must be applauded. Likewise, Levi Thaxter played a supportive role
from time to time in young Celia's education, but he could not possibly
provide psychological support and he refused to provide financial support once her promising career was established. He undermined her
career at every turn. The youthful idealism of the "Brothers and Sisters" was difficult, if not impossible, to sustain when the responsibilities
of maturity came.
On the other hand, Margaret Fuller was a Transcendentalist who lived
out her idealism to the end. Unlike her high-minded Boston brethren
who were content with small scale experiments such as Brook Farm and
Walden Pond, Margaret put her words into action and transcended the
provincial life of New England. Fuller could hardly be called "popular"
in her own day; rather, she was highly respected by a few intellectuals
whose opinions, in fact, did matter: Emerson, Guiseppe Mazzini, Adam
Mickiewicz and the Brownings recognized Fuller's genius and paid her
the homage that was due. Fuller's dream was to redeem American
womanhood, and from today's perspective it can be recognized that in
her maturity she did have the intellectual power to have done so. The
opportunities that Margaret Fuller found for personal growth in New
York and later in Rome were denied Celia Thaxter. Fuller was tested in
the crucible of the Italian Revolution, and she herself tested the Transcendental philosophy beyond the imagination of even Emerson. Celia
Thaxter never sought to develop the international reputation that Fuller
achieved, Thaxter's reputation being for the most part regional. As in
the case with many popular artists, Thaxter was to outlive her own reputation.
It was the inner life, the psychological dimension of Celia Thaxter's
life, that Margaret Fuller was able to predict with such remarkable accuracy. Writing of the paucity of educational opportunities for women
in 1844, Fuller stated: "Women have a tendency to repress their im-
Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1981
9
Colby Quarterly, Vol. 17, Iss. 4 [1981], Art. 6
JANE VALLIER
247
pulses and make them doubt their instincts, thus often paralyzing their
action during the best years."18 Repression, self-doubt, and emotional
paralysis are the story of Celia's adulthood. Thaxter's letters to Annie
Fields reveal a ritual which sustained her for thirty years. The letters
would begin with an anguished account of her daily heartbreaks: Levi's
irresponsibility, her son, Karl's, mental instability, her parents' prolonged illnesses; then after the frustration was expressed, Thaxter would
pull herself together with some consolation. In a letter dated March 22,
1876, Thaxter writes: "I am so blue (let me whisper in your kind ear!)
that I feel as if I bore the scar of Juggernaut upon my back day after
day. I totally disbelieve in any sunrise to follow this pitch-black night. I
believe I am going to see everything of a funereal purple color from this
time forth and forever! But nobody guesses it. I don't tell anybody but
you." 19 Her letters follow much the same pattern as many of her poems.
Occasionally Celia was able to break free, as in the two years after she
left Levi in 1872, and the two years after his death in 1884, but the
weight of her energy was always to be expended on the welfare of her
children, her brothers and her parents. Ironically, when Celia was no
longer needed by her family, she literally had no place to go. Financially
and artistically denied, Celia was homeless and hence dependent upon
the charity of friends.
At the end of Women in the Nineteenth Century Fuller wrote an
observation which might be elevated to a prophecy: "The lot of Woman
is sad. She is constituted to expect and need a happiness that cannot
exist on earth. She must stifle such aspirations within her secret heart,
and fit herself as well as she can, for a life of resignations and consolations. The life of Woman must be outwardly a well intentioned cheerful
dissimulation of her real life. "20 Celia Thaxter led that outwardly cheerful life Fuller had predicted, and only by remarkably good luck did
Thaxter's letters survive to reveal the dissimulations. She poured out her
heart to Annie Fields through the ritual of the daily letter while no one
else ever spoke of the details of her suffering which were known only to
Annie Fields. The hopes that Margaret Fuller had voiced in her description of "Miranda" ·were not to be fulfilled for the "Island Miranda"
whom Hawthorne had christened into the literary world.
Heartbreak aside, Margaret Fuller and Celia Thaxter represent succeeding generations of feminine achievement. There are remarkable similarities in patterns of their professional lives as well as in their personal
lives. Both women were known as brilliant conversationalists, further
evidence of their education "by ear," and each woman had an admiring
group of followers: Fuller for her conversations and teaching in the
Boston area, and Thaxter for her poetry readings at the Appledore
18. Fuller, p. 109.
19. Annie Fields and Rose Lamb, Letters of Celia Thaxter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), p. 71.
20. Fuller, p. 159.
http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol17/iss4/6
10
Vallier: The Role of Celia Thaxter in American Literary History: An Overvi
248
COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERLY
Hotel where hundreds of New Englanders spent their summers. Bearing
sometimes the entire financial responsibility for their families, both
women turned to journalism, one of the professions open to them since
they had dependent families and had to remain in their homes. Their experiences in journalism, although separated by twenty years, led both
writers away from romantic themes and toward realism. Each ended her
career with a manuscript for publication which was grounded in the experience of the outside world rather than the inside world of the domestic imagination. Unfortunately Fuller's manuscript of the Roman Revolution was lost in her fatal shipwreck, but Thaxter's My Island Garden,
the work of an amateur naturalist in the tradition of Thoreau, has survived and has recently been reprinted.
Although their talents were not similar-Fuller's gift was analytical
and historical whereas Thaxter's was narrative and lyrical-their psychological patterns are surprisingly similar. Margaret Fuller warned
"Let it not be said that wherever there is energy or creative genius, 'She
was a masculine mind!' " 2 I Because both Fuller and Thaxter possessed
vigorous problem-solving skills and physical stamina, they were often
described as "masculine." Self-possessed and self-reliant, neither woman could afford the luxury of being dependent on anyone for long.
Thaxter's physical vitality, her shunning of the sentimental, her vigorous problem-solving skills-all were prompted by her early childhood
training and tested in the daily round of activities in which she took
charge of the lives of so many people. She, like Margaret Fuller, was not
afraid of responsibility, although they both yearned for a strong spiritual companion with whom they could share their unusually heavy family burdens. Each woman was ultimately responsible for herself.
In order to escape the domestic quagmires in which they found themselves, both Fuller and Thaxter developed self-concepts as stage personalities or actresses. In 1844 Fuller wrote that it was not winning an
admiring audience that was so difficult, it was attaining the "platform"
in the first place. 22 Fuller and Thaxter both enjoyed playing the role of
the public personality. It was often said that Fuller played at being
"Margaret." Aware of her stage presence and how she looked in public,
Margaret took pains to dress beautifully, elegantly, and tastefully. 23
After learning the arts of "self-culture" Margaret took on a regal appearance. 24 Like Thaxter, she had fantasized that she was a queen, a
royal foundling left on her parents' dreary doorstep. Celia used this
same image in her autobiographical fragment, only she is a royal foundling left in the care of ignoble fishermen. Thaxter may well have borrowed the theme from her favorite poem, "Aurora Leigh," Elizabeth
21. Fuller, p. 43.
22. Fuller, p. 104.
23. Paula Blanchard, Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution (New York: DeltaSeymore-Lawrence, 1979), p. 62.
24. Ibid., p. 149.
Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1981
11
Colby Quarterly, Vol. 17, Iss. 4 [1981], Art. 6
JANE VALLIER
249
Barrett Browning's story of the abandoned female artist. Clearly Fuller
and Thaxter, as well as Browning, saw themselves as set apart from even
their own families by those superior intellectual qualities which in turn
separated them from their culture at large.
The feeling of not belonging even to their own families may have lead
Fuller and Thaxter and other talented women to form strong supportive
relationships with men who were established successfully in their respective fields: Fuller with Emerson, Thaxter with Whittier-even Dickinson
with Higginson. As mentors to these women, Enlerson, Whittier and
Higginson were probably flattered and somewhat bewildered. The relationships were safe ones for the women: Friendships were free to grow
on an idealized plane that was totally acceptable in New England society. Perhaps to evade the issue of their sexual lives it was said that both
Fuller and Thaxter had great talents for "friendship."25 The fact that
each of these female artists chose a strong, culturally powerful male to
authenticate, verify or support their work ties the women's reputations
securely to the men who were their mentors.
Part III: New England-and the World
To ApPLEDORE ISLAND, less than a mile square, came New England
and then the world, first in the form of the aesthetic and scholarly Levi
Thaxter, and later in the form of Celia's friends-James and Annie
Fields, William Dean Howells, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horace Greeley,
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Lucy Larcom, William Morris Hunt, Childe Hassam, Julius Eichberg, Ole Bulle, John
Greenleaf Whittier. The painters and musicians who came for the
summer seasons provided entertainment for the wealthy guests of the
Appledore Hotel, many of whom were women recovering fronl bad
cases of "nerves," or so they were diagnosed by the famous Dr. S. Weir
Mitchell of Philadelphia. The resort hotels on the Atlantic coast welcomed the rich and the sick, victims of both urban blight and medical
quackery. By the 1880's science and medicine were rumored to be related, but exactly how the general public didn't know. Rest and fresh air
were still the treatment for everything from tuberculosis to insanity,
while hypnotism and seances served simultaneously as religion, science
and entertainment. The Appledore Hotel was definitely middle-class
America: Someone like Henry James would have preferred to have
stayed in Boston.
It was Levi Thaxter, however, who in the 1840's set the tone for what
the summer life on the islands was to become. He himself had been sent
to the White Island Lighthouse to recover from nervous depression, and
it was to support his sinking spirits that his artist friends-Hawthorne
25. Fields and Lamb, p. 5.
http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol17/iss4/6
12
Vallier: The Role of Celia Thaxter in American Literary History: An Overvi
250
COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERLY
among them-first came to the islands. Even before the hotel was built
in 1849, Levi had begun a tradition of poetry readings for his friends
and family in his cottage on Appledore Island.
Levi's friends were a motley group, many of whom had been participants in the Brook Farm experiment of the early 1840's. Levi himself
might have been tempted to join Hawthorne, John Weiss and the others
at Brook Farm had he not had such an aversion to manual labor . (In
fact, Levi required the presence of a servant even while he lived in a fisherman's cottage.) The remote Isles of Shoals gave the second-generation
Transcendentalists a place to contemplate the glories of nature and escape the growing pressures of urban American life. Unitarian ministers
such as Weiss and Higginson met on Appledore to talk long into the
night about the issues of slavery and of church government. Out on the
islands there always seemed to be endless time and respite from the
clamor of Boston life. Hawthorne notes in his journal a convivial evening in Mr. Thaxter's cottage, an evening filled with laughter and singing: "At about 10 o'clock Mr. Titcomb and myself took leave and
emerging into the open air, out of that room of song, and pretty youthfulness of women, and gay young.men, there was the sky and the threequarters waning moon, and the old sea moaning all around the island. "26 It was this haunting beauty as well as the spirit of friendship
that brought people to the islands, and it was on this night, only two
years after Margaret Fuller's tragic death in a shipwreck that Hawthorne christened Celia Thaxter the "Island Miranda."
The second-generation Transcendentalists who had gathered around
Margaret Fuller for enlightenment on the social issues of the early
1840's had turned enthusiastically to the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth
Barrett Browning long before the Brownings had reached the height of
their popularity in England and Europe. An enthusiasm for Browning
was in the wind in Boston by 1842 and Levi Thaxter quickly gained the
distinction of being the best reader and interpreter of Robert Browning
in Boston. Not only did Levi read Browning to the "Brothers and Sisters," the romance of whose leaders, James Russell Lowell and Maria
White, seemed to parallel the heroic love story of the Brownings; Levi
had also read Browning to his young pupils-little Celia Laighton and
her two brothers-at the White Island lighthouse.
The effects of the Brownings on the early poetry of Celia Thaxter
should not be underestimated. Several of Thaxter's sonnets will be seen
as comparable in style and quality to those of Mrs. Browning, the best
example being "0 were I loved as I desire to be. "27 Thaxter was to
become proud of her own sonnets, although she readily admitted that
her attempts to treat the subject of idealized love in lyric and narrative
26. Hawthorne, VIII, 517.
27. Celia Thaxter, The Heavenly Guest: With Other Unpublished Writings, ed. Oscar Laighton (Andover, Mass.: Smith & Coutts, 1935), p. 17.
Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1981
13
Colby Quarterly, Vol. 17, Iss. 4 [1981], Art. 6
JANE VALLIER
251
verse were unsatisfactory. Most important to the poetic development of
Celia Thaxter, however, were the dramatic monologues of Browning
which she must have heard Levi read with great mastery. Her own
dramatic monologues, "In Kittery Churchyard" and "The Spaniards'
Graves," were Thaxter's most successful poems.
From the mid 1860's until her death in 1894, Celia Thaxter gave
poetry readings daily throughout the summer season at the Appledore
and Oceanic hotels on the Isles of Shoals. She read her own poetry first
and foremost, and that is perhaps one reason why she did not polish the
written versions of all of her poems, especially the later ones. They came
to life in oral performance, not on the written page. Some of her poems
go flat in the same way Margaret Fuller's recorded bits of conversation
do, since part of their meaning is implicit in the personality and reputation of the speaker.
The reputation of the poet and the tradition of oral performance
bring to mind a major cultural cross-current in mid to late nineteenthcentury America: The institution of the fireside poets. These poets,
Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes and Lowell with their formidable
literary powers as critics, editors and anthologizers, shaped the literature
of their day by their examples-both negative and positive. They dominated New England literary life until the last quarter of the century
when Howells, Twain and the realists divided and conquered new literary territory.
Being both poet and journalist, Celia Thaxter had friends in each
camp. The poetry of Thaxter belonged at the fireside, but her prose, like
Mark Twain's, was precisely realistic. The poet, James Russell Lowell,
admired her poetry while the novelist, William Dean Howells, admired
her prose. The influence of the fireside poets can be seen in Thaxter's
conventional prosody and her dogged optimism. "The sunrise never
failed us yet" is the closing line of a hymn that Thaxter wrote during
one of her darkest personal moments, and predictably the words struck a
responsive chord in the hearts of hard-working and uneducated New
Englanders, people who probably needed a good dose of daily optimism.
Celia Thaxter could not accurately be called a fireside poet: That title
was reserved for men only, men who wrote what might be called secular
sermons in poetry or verse. Entertaining and edifying, fireside poetry
was written for family reading which often meant that the father read to
his wife and children. The audience for fireside poetry included men,
even well-educated men, who would have found "feminine sensibility"
in poetry inappropriate for themselves to read aloud. The fireside poets
depended on a tradition of male authority in their verse.
From the firesides of Boston and New England homes came an everincreasing demand for the poetry of Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier and
Lowell. The coals for those flames were kept constantly stirred by the
ingenious publisher, James T. Fields, whose unusual combination of lit-
http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol17/iss4/6
14
Vallier: The Role of Celia Thaxter in American Literary History: An Overvi
252
COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERLY
erary judgment and business sense made the publishing house of
Ticknor and Fields largely responsible for the financial prosperity of
these fireside poets. At least financially speaking, James T. Fields was
the ideal editor to direct the early career of Celia Thaxter, sharing as
they did their native Portsmouth, an informed and intelligent optimism,
and the didactic legacy of Enlightenment poetry. Testimony to their
deep friendship is the story of how Celia Thaxter was with Fields the
moment he died-listening to Annie Fields read Thomas Gray's Letters. 28
As partner in the firm of Ticknor and Fields and as editor of the Atlantic from 1861 to 1871, James T. Fields virtually controlled the popular poetry market in America. He created the market for fireside poetry
by keeping the social and intellectual lives of the poets in the public eye.
With his genius for publicity, Fields tantalized the curiosity of hardworking readers with exotic visions of the poets striving toward the peak
of Parnassus. The Ticknor and Fields imprint was the guarantee of good
literature, the best that America and England had to offer; however,
Fields was not prepared to deal with the innovators in American literature-Whitman, Dickinson, even Henry James. Fields could tolerate
neither Whitman's sensuality nor Henry James' irreverence toward
America. (Henry James thought Fields bore an extraordinary resemblance to his wire-haired fox terrier .)29 Although Fields himself wrote
reams of light-hearted humorous verse which he read on public occasions such as his high school class reunion, he preferred to publish only
the moral, the earnest, the genteel.
From James and Annie Fields, then, Celia Thaxter absorbed many of
the literary standards and opinions that made her popular. Thaxter's
earliest poems were remarkable for their freedom from moralizing and
their sensuality, but as the influence of James and Annie Fields grew, so
did the didacticism of Celia's poems. Before she was drawn into the
Fields' social and literary life, Celia had only Levi Thaxter and his tastes
for Browning and the Pre-Raphaelites to guide her. If Celia's first poem
"Landlocked" had marked the beginning, not the height, which her
poetry would reach, one can only speculate where her talent might have
taken her.
But speculation is pointless: the fact was that James and Annie Fields
were virtually to control Celia's literary life. Their friends were her
friends, and their opinions seemed to become hers. Having neither the
education nor the aesthetic confidence to go very far beyond the Fields'
literary horizons, Celia became dependent on them, and thus limited by
them. Furthermore, James Fields' enthusiasm for Longfellow served as
a criterion against which he measured all poets. Unfortunately, it was
28. w. S. Tryon, Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T. Fields, Publisher to the Victorians (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1963), p. 382.
29. Ibid., p. 367.
Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1981
15
Colby Quarterly, Vol. 17, Iss. 4 [1981], Art. 6
JANE VALLIER
253
that same enthusiasm-specifically for Longfellow's "Hiawatha"which became the turning point in Fields' magnificent publishing career.
His defense of the literary merit of "Hiawatha" weakened his reputation for discriminating editorial taste, and when he tried to persuade the
Boston newspapers to "puff" the reviews of "Hiawatha" he was accused of letting financial profit dictate his literary judgments. Fields'
dedication to genteel poetry helped pave the way for Celia Thaxter's
success as a popular poet in the 1870's.
With the fireside poets, however, Celia Thaxter did share a belief in
the moral responsibility of a poet. Although she could never espouse a
traditional Christian view of the world, she did believe in the virtues of
love, loyalty, friendship and truth. Had she succumbed to Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps' efforts to convert her to Christianity, Thaxter might have
been an even more popular poet. "The consolations of religion I cannot
bear," 30 Thaxter wrote in 1877, and that one statement differentiates
her from many of her sister New England writers-Phelps, Lucy Larcom, Harriet Beecher Stowe, even Annie Fields.
The female counterparts to the fireside poets were the writers of Sunday School fiction and verse, women such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
and Lucy Larcom who wrote the stories and verses for the popular juvenile magazines, Our Young Folks, St. Nicholas and the Youth's Companion. Their authority seemed best exercised upon children or upon
other women. Although Celia Thaxter enjoyed the friendship of both
Phelps and Larcom, she could never adhere to their religious tenets.
Thaxter wrote a number of excellent poems and stories for children, but
the theme was always the inexorable laws of nature rather than the laws
of God: a canary is killed by a butcher bird, or a hunter shoots a burgomaster gull only after the merciless burgomaster has ravaged a flock of
gulls. One historian of children's literature lauds Thaxter as being "sane
and hale," not a sentimentalist. 31
Religion, however, played a role in Thaxter's life; her fascination with
spiritualism and eastern religions harks back to the earlier generation of
New England Transcendentalists. She approached spiritualism from a
scientific point of view, and when a significant number of the experiments in which she participated failed, she was able to discard her interest entirely. After Mrs. Thaxter suffered two heart attacks, however, her
attitude toward Christianity softened, and she was able to tell her solicitous Christian friends that she had begun to see the light.
Thaxter's unorthodox religious beliefs prohibited her from being included in a recent study of nineteenth-century American popular culture
which developed the thesis that New England ministers and women "exploited the feminine image and idealized the very qualities that kept
30. Fields and Lamb, p. 88.
31. Walter Barnes, The Children's Poets (Younker-on-Hudson, New York: World Book, 1925),
p.234.
http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol17/iss4/6
16
Vallier: The Role of Celia Thaxter in American Literary History: An Overvi
254
COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERLY
them powerless: timidity, piety, narcissism, and a disdain for competition." 32 Although Celia Thaxter was a popular writer in every sense of
the word, she was not a "feminizer." Her literary topic was "reason,"
and her approach was seldom sentimental. She used several of the topics
of sentimental literature-graveyard scenes, morbid isolation, nature's
soothing powers-but she seldom reduced herself to being the victim of
adversity: she was rather the opponent of adversity, the problem solver.
She was not what Albert Gelpi has called "a lady poet."33
An admiring neighbor of Thaxter's and a fellow poet, John Albee,
wrote a tribute to Celia Thaxter that reveals her to have fit the ideal expressed in the cult of true womanhood.
She knew how to play all the parts belonging to woman. She could make a musician play
his best, the poets and scholars say their best-bring forward the modest, shut the door on
the vulgar, and disengage one talent from another and give to each its opportunity . . . a
poet with poets, an artist with artists . . . (she was) equally at home in the kitchen, . . .
or with spade and trowel in her island gardens, or with fishermen and their wives and children, or as a nurse to the sick. 34
Because she was a good woman, she had the potential, or so her admirers thought, to be a good writer.
So talented, so resourceful, so individualistic was Celia Thaxter that
her life resists easy generalizations. It can be said that she was a local
color author like Sarah Orne Jewett, a children's author like Lucy Larcom, a journalist like Margaret Fuller, a romantic lyric poet like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Perhaps she was too many things, and that is
why she is so often included in lists, as she was in the premiere article in
the first issue of Women's Studies, 1972, where she was not clearly differentiated from other female local color writers. Even in that journal
dedicated to a more judicious view of women's accomplishments, Thaxter's individuality escaped the researcher.
Had Thaxter written several local histories rather than one, Among
the Isles of Shoals, or several books on horticulture rather than just one,
My Island Garden, or several collections of juvenile literature rather
than one-in addition to over 300 lyric and narrative poems-Celia
Thaxter might have been easy to classify. The case for her literary survival rests, like that of Margaret Fuller, not so much on what she wrote as
that she wrote, and that she dared to live out her singular life with a selfawareness and personal integrity rarely seen in the fragments that survive as records of the lives of nineteenth-century American women.
In the end, Celia Thaxter, the "Island Miranda," might have said
along with Margaret Fuller:
32. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon, 1978), pp. 6-9.
33. Albert Gelpi, "Emily Dickinson and the Deerslayer," Shakespeare's Sisters, ed. Sandra Gilbert
and Susan Gubar (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 122-134.
34. John Albee, "Memories of Celia Thaxter," The Heavenly Guest: With Other Unpublished Writings, ed. Oscar Laighton (Andover, Mass.: Smith & Coutts, 1935), p. 167.
Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1981
17
Colby Quarterly, Vol. 17, Iss. 4 [1981], Art. 6
JANE VALLIER
255
I stand in the sunny noon of life. Objects no longer glitter in the dews of morning, neither
are yet softened by the shadows of evening. Every spot is seen, every chasm revealed.
Climbing the dusty hill, some fair effigies that once stood for symbols of human destiny
have been broken; those I still have with me show defects in this broad light. Yet enough
is left, even by experience, to point distinctly to the glories of that destiny; faint, but not
to be mistaken streaks of future day. I can say with the bard, "Though many have suffered shipwreck, still beat noble hearts."B
Celia Thaxter would have found in the voice of Margaret Fuller's
Women in the Nineteenth Century a kindred spirit and a thinking
woman's consolation. Both women struggled against convention and
prejudice in order to unburden themselves of the truth of life as they
knew it. In the twentieth century Adrienne Rich speaks for those of us
who have continued that very struggle:
Today when I see "truthful"
written somewhere, it flares
like a white orchid in wet woods,
rare and grief-delighting, up from the page.
Sometimes, unwittingly even,
we have been truthful.
In a random universe, what more
exact and starry consolation? 36
Iowa State University
Ames
35. Fuller, p. 38.
36. Adrienne Rich, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems 1954-62 (New York: W. W. Norton,
1967), p. 36.
http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol17/iss4/6
18